Make Your Own Beautiful and Affordable Linens

February 26, 2017

Make Your Own Beautiful and Affordable Linens

I have a bedding problem. I think everyone has a category of item they are always coveting. For my mom it’s rugs. My husband loves cool tee shirts. For me, it’s definitely bedding. When my best friend and I first talked, it was about our mutual desire for all the gorgeous duvet covers in the new Anthropologie catalog. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to apply my DIY powers to my constant desire for beautiful bedding until this summer when we got a California King sized bed, and I was absolutely not about to pay hundreds of dollars for a new bedding set for our new giant bed.

When my mother in law came to visit for a week last August she and I worked together on this project and it was so much fun! We used an indigo dye kit, flour sack towels, unbleached muslin fabric, and four plain white pillow cases to create a dreamy Shibori bed set. I even dyed a ring sling as well. I used the muslin to sew Euro sized pillow shams, and I sewed the flour sack towels together at the edges to create a beautiful linen look bedspread that has worn nicely, despite getting washed at least once a week for months now.

This Thanksgiving my husband and I hosted for the first time, and I decided I wanted a soft, watercolor inspired table, and my budget was $40 for all decor and serving ware, of which we were missing quite a lot. A quick trip to the thrift store yielded brass candle sticks, glassware, and beautiful silver serving pieces. For linens I turned to my old friends flour sack towels, and tried watercolor painting with fabric paint. They came out beautifully and we use them everyday now as tea towels. All I did was get the towels wet, spread them out on a piece of plywood, water down fabric paint and paint to my heart’s content. I let them dry outside, and then dried on high heat to set the paints before washing and drying through a normal cycle. This is a project that would be so fun to do with kids, and I look forward to trying it again with my son in the future.

These are only two ways that you can dye and decorate fabric to create your own beautiful custom linens. Here are a few more I intend to try this year:

I hope I have given you some inspiration to create your own beautiful linens! Have you done any of these projects, or other fun fabric dyeing projects? I would love to hear about them in the comments, feel free to share links to any projects you have shared online.